Canter Bridge

I love animals.

Proof of this comes in the two- and four-legged denizens of our home and the birds that have flocked to my backyard feeders on three continents.

Tucker is my dear, muttish Labrador Retriever. Like all Labbies, his intellect is overpowered by his instinct for giving and receiving affection. Tucker was the product of an unplanned mating on a Costa Rican farm four years ago.

During a four-year sojourn in a tiny, drafty apartment in Cambridge, England (1994-1998), we had promised our sons Christopher and Johnny that when we returned to Costa Rica-our adoptive country-we would have at least one dog and one cat.

When our friends on the farm informed us that a litter was unexpectedly on the way on their farm, we signed up.

On a crisp, blue-skied late morning we made the drive up the mountain to Birr’, one of those villages pitched onto the volcanic slopes that surround the central valley, our hearts racing in anticipation of the puppies we would see and The Puppy that would be ours. I’m not sure who of the four of us was more excited, but boyish glee may have come in middle-aged man form that day as strongly as in little boys.

The lot fell to Christopher to choose The Puppy. A half dozen unchosen puppies, 3 of them golden and three black, raced around the big yard, yanking on each other’s skin like one rolling muddle of yelps and doggy joy. To this day Christopher doesn’t know why he chose Tucker. Yet by doing so he marked the path of our family’s life and brought into my own a consistent source of loyal companionship. I dread to imagine that one day Tucker’s life will have fulfilled its quotient of friend-making on this earth, and I’ll go on without him.

That thought is best held for another day.

A complex calculus of family fairness had decreed that Christopher would choose our dog and Johnny would name him. En route back to Costa Rica after England, Johnny had spied a Golden Retriever named ‘Tucker’ in the SkyMall catalogues that tempt idle air travelers to need things they don’t need. It happens that Tucker the Golden-most definitely to be distinguished from Our Tucker-was for some years a kind of noble model in the pages of SkyMall catalogues. His elegant form graced dog pillows, pranced in and out of dog doors, and generally left a regal impress upon canine products of many shapes and sizes.

From there Johnny culled the name that Our Tucker bears to this day.

Tucker bears the remarkable achievement of having flunked out of doggy school. During a two-week vacation early in his life, we drove up the mountain again, choosing a route that skirted Birr’ and led us instead to the dog training school of a certain ‘don Jesœs’, whose reputation for turning disobedient dogs into noble companions for a song had reached our home.

Parting with Tucker for two weeks was a grief observed, softened only by the anticipation that don Jesœs would work wonders and return this black youngster to us two weeks hence as a better dog. In our minds, we fixed upon Tucker’s momentary spasms of obedience-some accidental, no doubt-and extrapolated out to the 10th power what such earnest response to his masters would look like once don Jesœs had worked his powers upon our genealogically challenged little boy. We told ourselves that ‘Tucker had gone to be with Jesus’, no doubt hoping for some of the transformative results normally associated from such an ascent.

Two weeks later our little Nissan Sentra made its struggling pilgrimage up the mountain again, all four of us straining our eyes as we climbed on one of Costa Rica’s most glorious springtime mornings to the place where don Jesœs had assured us he would be waiting with our little boy.

To be sure, the outcome was remarkable. Tucker walked on his lead without straining, dutifully pulling a 180 at each end of the dog walk as don Jesœs taught as how to walk so that Tucker would understand he was meant to heel. There was even an extraordinary bit of climbing up ramps, across what looked like an extended balance beam, and down the other side with a poise and balance that Tucker’s puppied energy had never led us to expect.

Alas, there was also some bad news. Tucker had done OK in ‘Obedience 101’. But he had not been all that don Jesœs had hoped. He would not be allowed to continue into ‘Obedience 102’, where we had been led to anticipate even greater transformative feats with regard to the canine personality.

Here, don Jesœs rose a bit upon his rhetorical hind legs and spoke with a rather ponderous authority, letting us know via this amiable brush with greatness that his judgment was final and not to be questioned. He seemed to have come to expect great protest and so to signal ahead of time that arguments would be fruitless. He ran, after all, a very serious kind of dog training school and could afford spasms of elitist selectivity when the dog population that was brought hopefully to his feet required it.

Tucker, we learned from don Jesœs, was ‘juguet—n’. Roughly similar to our notion of a ‘joker’, ‘juguet—n’ is not a word that is applied lightly to its subject. In human society, it conjures up a pleasantly unlawful youth whose company and knack for a joke is to be admitted, but who is not likely to end up in law school or even to hold down a respectable desk as the local accountancy firm. You often observe a ‘juguet—n’ in his accustomed place in the local park, or reclined with a smile on the bench near the bus stop.

Tucker, in short, had seen his prospects nipped in the bud, his canine trajectory abbreviated by the practiced eye of an expert trainer who knew when to cut his losses rather than invest his formidable skills in a specimen such as our Tucker. No doubt he would make a fine pet, don Jesœs tossed into the conversation to raise our spirits. But one ought not expect to be much impressed by Tucker and it was best that we understand this now.

The expectation of greatness is a cruel guide through this veil of tears, particularly when it attaches itself to raw material that is in some fundamental manner lacking in the virtues.

Tucker would never be the most obedient dog in the neighborhood. It felt as though the other dogs who looked on from their cages as we shuffled to our car looked with bemused disdain on Tucker and his family as we shuffled to our car. We took him home and loved him all the more.